Google Analytics
Google - some facts
• Google search handles over 1 billion searches per day • 7.2 billion daily page views
• 87.8 billion monthly worldwide searches conducted on Google sites • Google’s global search market share is 85%
• Daily visitors to Google is 620 million
• Google analytics is used on 57% of the top 10,000 websites 10,000 websites
What is Google Analytics?
• Google Analytics is a powerful tool that can be used for monitoring all aspects of your websites traffic, from referrals to search engine activity • You can use it to track traffic patterns
What does Google Analytics tell me?
1. How many people are visiting your website.2. The keywords they used to find you on search engines. 3. Which website referred them to you.
4. What page they saw first.
5. How much time they spent on your site. 6. How many pages they visited.
7. What page they left your site from.
How does it work?
• Google provides a unique tracking code (javascript) that is inserted into each page in your website
• When a visitor arrives at your website they load a page.
• In the process, their browser loads and runs the Google code (Javascript)
• That code (Javascript) collects information about the visitor • The information is sent to Google
• A programme at Google's end then stores all the detailed observations (information) that were recorded.
How does this work on the College website?
• All College web pages contain the Google Analytics code• The code is added automatically to every new page that is created • Tracking a new page - after you first create the web page, it may take
several hours for report data to appear in the analytics account.
How do I get access to the College’s statistics?
To get access to the College Google Analytics area you need to:
1. Set up a Google account login using your College email address.
To register please go to:
https://www.google.com/accounts/NewAccount
2. Email Peter Gillings ([email protected]) and he will give you access to the College Google
Analytics area
So what does our report tell you?
You will have access to the entire web statistics of the College website. At a top level, across our complete web presence, you will be able to see: • Profile of overall visits over a time span
• Summary of site usage statistics • Source of visitor’s country
What do the metrics mean?
Visits: The number of visits to your site during a given time period. Pageviews: The number of pages these visitors viewed.
Pages/Visit: The average visit in terms of page views.
Bounce Rate: The percentage of people who only visited one page on your site before they “bounced” somewhere else. (This can often seem deceptively high, but many people will get to your site and realise that it wasn’t what they were looking for, or you may have a popular image indexed by Google’s Image Search that generates a lot of “drive-by” traffic and skews your numbers. Alternatively, it may represent that your site is difficult to navigate or understand for new visitors.)
Avg. Time on Site: The average amount of time a visitor spends at your site.
The Google Analytics interface
Three main areas:
1) Home –this is your customisable area. Here you can curate your
dashboard, get an overview of your alerts and manage your shortcuts 2) Standard Reporting – the main analytics area made up of Audience,
Advertising, Traffic source, content and conversion data.
The Dashboard
The Dashboard can give you a high level overview of what is going on with your site.
Its made up of a series of widget that you can edit to display the data information that you would like to see at a glance
Typically the dashboard defaults to show: 1) Visits to your site
2) Average visit duration – the time spent on your site
3) Visits by traffic type – where the traffic arrives from eg direct, by email, organic (search engines)
4) Visits by country
Standard Reporting
Main Features: • Audience • Advertising • Traffic Sources • Content • Conversions .Reporting period
This is an essential feature of Google Analytics
• Use the calendar to search for the data you want to report on • Date range – from: day/moth/year to: day/moth/year
Analysing your data
• Many of the reports that include a table of statistics also let you view those statistics by different dimensions
• Along the top of the table, you see a list of Viewing options. Each of those options is another dimension
• Click an option to change how statistics are displayed in the table
Audience
• This primary feature gives you a good, high-level overview of how your site is doing.
Audience - overview
This report tells you:• how much traffic you have • how many page views • the average length of visit • bounce rates
• the demographics of your visitors • You can delve deeper depending on
Audience - Demographics
Language - the list of top languages used on the internet browsers of the visitors. These languages are abbreviated into codes representing the
names of languages.
A list of all of language abbreviations: http://www.loc.gov/standards/iso639-2/php/code_list.php
Audience - Behaviour
New vs. returningBreakdown of new visitors to your site and returning ones. You can explore top
browsers, operating systems, screen resolutions & colours
Frequency & Recency
• number of times a visitor has been to your site. • % of total visits/page views
• number of days since the last time your visitors have been to your site
Engagement
Audience - Technology
Browser and Operating System – lists the type of browser your visitors are using and which
operating system
Audience - Mobile
Overview – how many visitors used mobile devices and how many did not. You can set these dimensions against other standard metrics. Useful to see
and therefore respond to changes in the way in which your site is accessed
Devices – a really useful breakdown of which mobile devices your visitors are browsing your site on. Can help to decide which devices to support
overtime.
Can be analysed against: • Model
• Brand
• Service provider
• Input selector – eg touch screen, click wheel • Operating system
Audience – Visitor flow
• High level visual view of visitors journeys through your site
Traffic Sources - Overview
Traffic Sources – the sources
Direct Traffic –Typing the web address directly into their web browser’s address bar, clicking on a bookmark, or where they’re directed to a page from an offline source such as a link in a PDF document.
Referring Traffic – The sites that visitors were on at before they arrived at your site and clicked on a link to your site, not including search
engines.
Search – clicking on links in search engine results pages (Google, Bing, Yahoo! etc)
• Organic - natural search
• Paid – a pay-per-click search ad
Use with other metrics to give meaning to your results, such as, Bounce rate, average time on site
Traffic Sources - Keywords
Keywords – What words did visitors use at Google and the other search engines to find your site?
Throughout the traffic sources reports you can see which keywords were used to arrive at your site
Understanding which keywords are used is important: • when writing for Search Engine Optimisation
Traffic Sources – what do they mean?
Use with other metrics to give meaning to your results, such as: • Bounce rate
• Average time on site
- try to monitor the traffic sources that provide visitors who spend the most time on site.
Traffic Sources – campaigns
After creating an AdWords or custom campaign, track its activity. Custom campaigns - useful for newsletters, events promotions,
publications such as prospectuses.
Content - Overview
What pages get the most traffic on your site? This report breaks it down for you so you can better see how people are using your site.
Overview - On the content overview page, the graph represents page views rather than visits, so the numbers used should be a lot larger than on the visits graph.
Pageviews and unique pageviews are both shown.
The difference is that a pageview is recorded every time a page is
Content - site content overview
What can you see?• The pages on which they enter and exit your site. • How often and how long they view individual pages.
• The extent to which they search your site for specific content. • The extent to which they interact with things like slide shows or
embedded videos.
• How frequently they click AdSense ads, and the revenue you see from those clicks.
• Based on this data, you can develop an understanding of how well your content addresses the purpose of your site
• For example, if your landing pages have a high bounce rate and
Content - site speed
This allows you to examine how quickly your pages load in different
browsers, geographic areas, etc. No setup is required and you can see your data in the Overview and Page Timings reports.
Things to look at:
• Content—which landing pages are slowest?
• Traffic sources—which campaigns correspond to faster page loads overall?
• Visitor—how does latency compare by visitor type or geographic region?
Content - can I look at data for a specific page group?
Filtering a content report will allow you to get statistics about your owncontent
Go into the Content area and choose Overview and view the full report then at the bottom of the report Filter search by the name of the
Where are people coming from/going to?
Navigation summary - shows the most popular previous and next pages Entrance paths - shows you how well your landing (entrance) pages
Custom Reports
You create your own customised reports in the manage your
customised reports section.
Using the data with other Google tools
Google AdWords is one of the various tools that can be used to make the most of the data that Google collects
You can link Google Analytics to AdWords
•You create ads and choose keywords, which are words or phrases related to your business.
•Your ads appear on Google - When people search on Google using one of your keywords, your ad may appear next to the search result
•https://adwords.google.co.uk
•Tracking these ads - these are linked to conversions in Google Analytics
How the Business School use AdWords
What?The Business School currently have an Adwords campaign running for each of their programmes.
Why?
To supplement organic search on Google
To inform their search engine optimisation (SEO) work; - what keywords people are searching for
- what keywords convert how visitors are interacting with the site etc. Next?
Become less reliant on AdWords
